Life in a North Korean Prison

But if he were to take his own life, how exactly to do it? Bucher had no gun to blow out his brains with, and he lacked the physical strength and demonic willpower to bash them out against a wall. He might be able to fashion a noose from a blanket, but there was nothing to hang it from. He thought of breaking his window and using a glass shard to slit his wrists, but the noise would attract the guards who patrolled continuously just outside his door. If he jumped out the third-story window, he’d probably end up with no more than a broken leg.

The only other possibility was a metal pail in his cell. It had been filled with water so he could wash his face. In his desperation the skipper began to think he could drown himself in it. He’d heard that drowning wasn’t too unpleasant once you stopped struggling. To anyone in a normal frame of mind, the notion of drowning yourself in a bucket would be absurd. But the bereft captain thought it might work.

It had to work.

His cell was so cold that a thin layer of ice had formed over the water in the pail. Bucher speared his head through the ice. Most of the water slopped out and the shock of the freezing liquid brought him to his senses. To end his life this way, he realized, was impossible. Drenched and defeated, he pulled his head out.

By Jan. 26, his third day in prison, Bucher was so weak he could barely walk. Interrogations and beatings went on day and night; the skipper heard shouts, scuffling and muffled cries as his men were slugged and pistol-whipped. He tried to get a few minutes of sleep whenever he was left alone in his room. But almost as soon as he closed his eyes, horrific images filled his head: explosions ripping through his ship, bloody bodies carried off in stretchers, a man dangling from a meat hook.

Bucher developed a fever, his body racked by chills. Slumped in his chair, he sank into torpor and confusion. At times he thought he was delirious. He couldn’t distinguish between the moan of the wind outside the winter-bound prison and the cries of his men within. When the Koreans unexpectedly gave back his watch, he stared at it obsessively, trying to restore his sense of time. He began to hallucinate, seeing the dial replaced by the angry face of an interrogator shrieking threats at him. A nurse entered his cell and injected him with something; he wasn’t sure what.

When he finally had to move his bowels, he nearly fainted from the pain of the shrapnel lodged in his rectum. His body stank from stale sweat and suppurating leg wounds. Concerned by his shivering and lack of appetite, his captors moved him across the hall to a cell where the radiator actually emitted some warmth.

In his lucid moments the skipper yearned to see a mushroom cloud billowing above Pyongyang. An American nuclear strike meant his own immolation, of course, but Bucher wanted these piratical animals punished regardless. His Navy briefers had promised swift and forceful retaliation if anything happened to him and his men, but so far there had been no visible action. The North Koreans seemed nervous about the possibility of an air strike or commando raid, and kept the prison blacked out at night. They threatened to kill Bucher if his countrymen tried to rescue him or avenge the Pueblo’s capture.

He didn’t particularly care. Unable to sleep, he shuffled back and forth in his cell, his mind buzzing with unanswerable questions.

What classified materials had the North Koreans salvaged beside the documents he’d been shown? How many sailors had signed phony confessions? Had the U.S. government seen through the ludicrous propaganda sham that was Bucher’s own statement? He reproached himself for not radioing Japan while the ship was under attack and specifically stating that it had never trespassed in North Korean waters. Was the Pentagon’s uncertainty over the ship’s whereabouts the reason for the absence of retaliation?

He struggled to understand why the communists grabbed the Pueblo in the first place. The only explanations that made any sense were that they wanted to start another war with South Korea or to distract the United States from Vietnam. Why didn’t they seem interested in using him for anything other than propaganda? When they’d pounded enough “confessions” out of him and his crew, would the seamen be freed or left to rot for years in this miserable sty? Or simply taken to an empty field and shot?

The more he thought about it, the angrier he got at the Navy for ordering him into the Sea of Japan with such poor preparation and equipment. His request for a specially designed destruction system for the Special Operations Detachment hut—the Pueblo’s intelligence-gathering command center—had been rejected. He had been saddled with too many secret papers and given peashooters to defend against 57-millimeter cannons. Worst of all, he had been lulled into a false sense of security.